Integrated fuzzy analysis and group decision making method for collaborative product development

Group decision-making is one of the most important issues in product development. In order to tackle the vague and sometimes conflicting decision data, this paper presents a new approach based on fuzzy similarity and fuzzy compromise to deal with the fuzzy nature of group decisions. In the proposed method, a modified fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process method is used to get the criterion weights, a novel consensus aggregation algorithm is given to obtain the conflict-free results, and an improved compromise decision means is utilized to calculate the utilities of alternatives. Finally an integrated product development solution evaluation process is illustrated as a numerical example, and the corresponding software package is also developed.